...more recent posts
The Williamsburg bridge is closed in both directions. Lots of helicopters in the air. This is one block from my apartment. Not sure what is happening.
Richard Perle has resigned.
Interesting Reuters piece: A retired Yugoslavian army officer who claims to have helped construct Saddam's underground bunkers, says they can withstand a 20 kiloton blast.
Fazlic said underground concrete fortresses were built by the former Yugoslav military in the cities of Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and Nassiriya after Iraqi officials toured similar facilities in former Yugoslavia.
"We also built the so-called "zero," "P" and "C" types of bunkers which were smaller and meant for the military, communications centers and so on but can also resist heavy bombardment and longer isolation," he said.
Fazlic said he took part in the building of more than a dozen underground bunkers in former Yugoslavia which was then led by late President Josip Broz Tito, who had warm relations with Saddam Hussein.
"We built all of these facilities in Iraq because they liked what they saw here," Fazlic said, citing a large bunker dug into a mountain near the southern Bosnian town of Konjic that was meant for the former Yugoslav government in case of war.
NJ Governor James E. McGreevey and Sid Caspersen, New Jersey's director of the office of counter-terrorism, indicated in a press conference that if the U.S. moves to code red citizens will be required to stay inside their houses.
This according to the Courier Post Online.
If the nation escalates to "red alert," which is the highest in the color-coded readiness against terror, you will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home, the state's anti-terror czar says.In addition, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia recently said, in public, that the government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. "The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."
Supposedly Tom Brokaw will have a 'blogs and war' segment in first half of NBC nightly news this evening.
I'm dedicated to not watching the world so closely today.
Especially the super scary stuff about North Korea cutting off contact with the U.S. and U.N., and also threatening to nuke Japan if the Japanese go ahead with their planned launch of a spy satellite this week.
Iraq continues to put up resistence. Sean-Paul at the agonist is reporting (unsourced) that CENTCOM (U.S. central command) is reporting that the Iraqis mounted a counter offensive on U.S. armored divisions south of Baghdad. This attack was - again, of course, supposedly - quickly repelled. But still, that's some crazy shit to try.
Possibly they are emboldened by the destruction of 2 M1/A1 Abrams main battle tanks. This is a much bigger deal then the number (2) would indicate. In fact, it's the first time this tank has ever been destroyed by enemy fire. The Israelis went through something similar this passed year when 2 of their "invincible" tanks were destroyed in the West Bank. Two tanks (out of hundreds) doesn't matter, but psychologically it's got to hurt. We didn't think they had weapons that could do it - and quite obviously they do. Some speculate the Russian connection, but I don't think there is any evidence at this point.
Still no word from Basra, but I'll be surprised if the British don't go in, in force, sometime today.
I'm completely stealing this idea from someone I won't name, but I think it's worth throwing out there. Probably I'm getting it a little wrong, but here goes.
First, assume the U.S. knows that Saudi Arabia is going to fall (sooner or later, but probably sooner.)
Assume that the war in Iraq is largely to secure enough oil in preparation for this eventuality.
The idea is that we take Baghdad and the oil fields in the north. We pump this oil out through Turkey.
And we let Iran take the south and those oil fields. Maybe we pretend to protest at this, maybe not. But the point is, we will use Iran as a buffer between our northern occupation, and the scary fundamentalist regime that will have sprung up in Saudi Arabia.
I find this to be a very compelling theory.
Still no real news. The story, at the moment, seems to be Basra. Is there an "uprising?" There are rumors, but not much more. You can be sure that reporters will be rushed in if we do secure the city, so that clearly hasn't happened yet. Either we go in soon, or there will be a humanitarian disaster, as the million plus residents have been without electricity and water since Sunday. That is very bad, and it would appear that time is essentially up. We have to move on Basra immediately.
But without an uprising from inside the city British forces tasked with capturing the city will either lose a lot of men, or inflict huge casualties on the civilian population they are supposedly liberating, or both. But they can't just stand outside the city and watch a million people die.
And Basra was supposed to be easy. The first photo op of the war. Gulp.
The other story is the 4th Infantry Division. My understanding (I'm just getting up to speed on the all the military nomenclature) is that this is the group that would have come through Turkey, but since they weren't allowed they sailed through the Suez on their way around to Kuwait. (I understand they are not on the ships, just their mechanized equipment - they'll be dropped where ever the machinery is unloaded.)
There are 3 U.S. divisions closing in on Baghdad. One from the West of the Euphrates, one just east of the Euphrates, and one along the Tigris. But these soldiers have been fighting for many days and need a rest. Also, they need to be resupplied. The 4th (and maybe more) is apparently necessary to shore up these troops before the big fight can begin.
Supposedly it will be at least Saturday or Sunday before the 4th can join the fight coming up from Kuwait. But there are two other wild cards:
- the many unconfirmed reports of Turkish troops coming over the boarder are actually misidentified U.S. troops. Somehow we cut a deal with the Turkish military and they are letting the 4th through against the expressed wishes of the government.
- the ships with the 4th's gear have secretly landed at Al Aqabah on the Red Sea in Jordan instead of sailing all the way around the peninsula to Kuwait. From here they will cross Jordan and materialize out of the western Iraqi desert to join the fight on Baghdad. This would be Gen. Frank's wild card surprise move.
My money is on the second possibility, but it's still going to be many days before we have enough strength around Baghdad to start the fight. I say Friday at the earliest (with the surprise Jordan route,) or Sunday at the very earliest if they do go all the way around. And it could even be longer. It's a long way around that penninsula (Here's a general map of the region; here's one of Jordan.)
So we wait. Watch what the British do in Basra. And continue our psy ops in an effort to get Iraqi generals to turn on Saddam. This is really our only plan, as far as I can see. Try to draw some RG divisions out into the open where we can crush them, showing our massive fire power - while working back channels to try and get someone inside to off Sadam. Maybe keep this up for a week? Two weeks?
Only when it is clear that Sadam will not be taken out from inside do we launch the assualt on Baghdad. I guess at that point we'll find out if they are going to use chemical or biological or radialogical weapons. If they do then I have no idea what will happen. If they stay conventional, then we go in and slug it out. Most likely amazingly bloody. Huge Iraqi casualties - many tens to hundreds of thousands. Thousands of U.S. and British casualties.
But eventually we will take the city. And then the really hard part starts: keeping the country together. Ugh. Enough for now.
The Agonist keeps going after a bandwidth crunch yesterday afternoon. Supposedly had 90,000 hits yesterday, but no explanation of what that means (raw server requests? page loads? unique visitors?) There was a mention of him in the NYT today that I haven't seen yet, so I'll assume that number is going way up today. Maybe in the Wall St. Journal as well? He is doing a great job, but at a certain point his model will break down.
Jorn is in the comments, and I saw at least one posting with advice on reducing bandwidth. I couldn't agree more. The page is freakin' huge (over 120k!) I think he should get rid of the graphics and put all the side links on a secondary 'links' page, and reduce the length of the page to just the last three posts. That would get the page size down to around 12k.
Instead, he's going with mirrors (i.e., duplicating the site onto other servers and encouraging people to hit the mirrors instead of the main site.) But this won't work because the reason people are reading him is for up to the minute (second) news, and the mirrors are lagging in time. So what's the point?
In any case, this is the most important blog story ever, I think, and I hope he is able to stay up under the load.
Remarkable lack of information coming from the battle field. That's the only story for the last 12 hours.